UPDATE: The Justice Department has just opened a civil rights investigation into an apparent hate crime last weekend in Spokane involving a 66-year African-American man. “We are concerned about elements of the incident because any crime that is potentially hate-motivated is not only an attack on the victim, but threatens and intimidates an entire community,” an FBI spokeswoman tells Hatewatch.
The FBI is expected to review a hate crime in which a black man was assaulted with a handgun and called ethnic slurs before several gunshots were fired into his home in Spokane last weekend.